COPENHAGEN, April 7: Some 10,000 German children who fled unaccompanied to Denmark as World War II drew to a close in the spring of 1945 were subjected to “inhumane treatment”, according to a Danish doctoral thesis presented on Thursday.

Historian and physician Kirsten Lylloff’s thesis, presented at Copenhagen University, claims that the thousands of unaccompanied children who sought refuge in the Scandinavian country from the Russian troops pouring into Germany ended had been abused.

The refugee children, the youngest of whom was three years old, were locked up for two years in camps surrounded by barbed wire where they were kept under close surveillance, fed insufficient amounts of food and lacked medicines and enough clothing, according to Kirsten Lylloff.

She described the treatment of many of the children as “harsh and inhumane”, calling it “the greatest contemporary humanitarian catastrophe in Denmark”.

“It is clear that the German children, subjected to feelings of ethnic hate from the Danes, paid dearly for their parents’ mistakes,” Ms Lylloff said in an interview on a Danish television station.

“And when we hear about ethnic cleansing and talk about the monstrosities committed against the Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda for instance, or in the Balkans, we should remember that we were driven by the same norms due to ethnic hatred,” she told Danish daily Politiken.

Ms Lylloff’s thesis, written after nearly two years of pouring over witness testimonies and other research, contradicts most Danish history books which tend to portray the Danish treatment of Germans after the war as good.—AFP